Make Money On The Side - Make Extra Income Online for Free

In your search to make money on the side, I can guarantee you've come across all sorts of outrageous claims about making $25,000 plus in a month for free probably by "posting links on google", as well as a great deal of other nonsense put up on the web by internet marketers who want you to spend money on their products. (The phrase posting links on google actually has no meaning whatsoever!)

You may have already been scammed by exaggerated promises and lost out financially when all you want to do is find some legitimate ways to make a reasonable side income without spending out a tonne of cash. Well I will tell you plain and straight how to make some extra income on the internet right here, right now and completely for free. I'm not going to ask you to purchase anything at all like the online money scams do, but explain to you how I went from working full time for an employer to working part time, at home, for myself.

Internet marketers tell you making money online is fast and that it's easy. Just sign up here or buy this product and you can retire in a year or two. Simply put - it's a lie. Do not trust anyone that makes these kinds of claims about earning online. It's not fast and it's not necessarily easy, but......it is very possible. You can make money on the side on the internet if you know what to do and where to find the real deal.

So I'll cut to the chase - the real deal is this: making either a full-time or part-time income on the net basically comes down to writing. Why? Well, the internet is all about information and information comes via words. Even if you decide on affiliate sales, or an Ebay business you'll still need to write sales pages (unless you want to outsource this part of the work, but that's definitely not free!). So to be perfectly, crystal clear, making money on the side, on the internet, is reliant on you writing content that searchers are interested in.

Writing pages for the web either through article websites, such as the one you're on right now (HubPages), or your own blog or website, is called writing web content. Before you click away be aware that you don't need to be a fantastic writer to write web content. You don't have to be a literary genius to make money online. You just need to be able to put sentences together and have a fair grasp of spelling and grammar. You probably do this everyday in your work, writing emails, reports, etc, so really it's nothing new and certainly nothing to feel frightened of.

Far more important, when starting to making money on the side on the internet, than your writing ability, are two personality traits or characteristics, which are Tenacity and Consistency. With these two traits you can be earning a nice side income ($300+ per month) by this time next year no problem and I'll tell you why they are so fundamentally important after we've talked about what to write and where to write online.

If at this point you're wondering whether to believe me (it's okay, being wary is very wise when it comes to people making claims about earning online!), then scroll down to the bottom of this article where you'll see links to two articles I've written showing my actual earnings over the last few months.

Get Writing Web Content

There are various free online venues to make money writing web content and you're going to need to choose between these. But before you choose where to write, you're going to need to decide what to write about. This is the most important choice you will make in your online money making venture so make sure you give it plenty of thought over the next few weeks. More specifically, what you need to start thinking about, is what your niche is going to be. Your niche is the topic you are going to write on.

What to Write About?

Now you may think you don't know anything much, but that is nonsense - you know plenty. A good place to start when thinking about your niche is to look at your hobbies and areas of interest. Do you know loads about parenting, audio systems, trains, cancer, babies, decorating, fixing cars or something else? Get a list together of topics that you know about. (If deciding on your niche is hard for you, I have written an article all about what topics to write about which will help you get a list together.)

What You Know Can Earn You Money

Once you've got a list of potential topics you're going to need to assess which is the most profitable for you to start writing on and this is easier than it sounds. Your first stop is to head over to Googles Keyword Tool. One by one type in the topic headings you have chosen and ensure that where is says "Choose columns to be displayed" you select "Show Estimated Avg CPC". This will enable you to see what advertisers are willing to pay to display ads for each niche topic. Simply, go for the niche topic area that has the highest average CPC (or cost per click).

So now you've decided what to write about, you need to think about where to write. If you want to start earning a side income completely for free, then you can start a blogger.com blog or you can sign up here at HubPages. There are other online writing venues, but in my experience these are the best two. Before you do sign up for one of these though, think hard about what your blog url or hubpages name is going to be. If you've decided to write about gardening for example, then it will serve you to have a HubPages name such a Gardening Man or Gardening Tips or something along those lines. It's a little more complex choosing a good blog url, because you will need to start learning about one of the fundamental aspects of earning online and that's choosing good KEYWORDS.

Words...words....words....It's all About Words

All keywords are, are the words someone types into a search engine to get information. So for instance to arrive at this page you may have typed in to a search box "make money on the side" or some other highly related phrase. If I've done my job well then when that phrase is typed into Google's search box, my page will be listed on the first page of search results. This is what you will need to achieve as well to get enough visitors to your pages of web content to make a good side income. The subject of choosing good keywords and keyphrases is too lengthly to explain in full here, but you'll find an easy tutorial on finding good keywords here. Study it - Learn it - Practice it. It's the basis of making money on the side online.

Now I said earlier that we were going to talk about two really important characteristics that you need to possess to be earning a reasonable amount of money on the side by this time next year - Tenacity and Consistency. You'll need these qualities in buckets because you're going to have to commit to writing 2 or more blog posts or web articles per week to be successful at this and you won't see much in the way of returns for 6 months or more. If you can stick at it, you could easily be earning $300 plus dollars a month in 6-12 months from now and well over $800 per month in 1-2 years, for around 5 hours of work per week. So it's not quick, it's not easy, but it's very do-able.

At this point you may be saying to yourself, OK I get that I need to write but where does the money come from? The money comes from adverts on your pages through Google Adsense and the selling of affiliate products through a company such as Amazon. Each time someone clicks on an ad on your page you get some money and each time someone purchases an item from Amazon through your page you get a percentage of the sale. So once you've started writing your blog posts or articles you'll need to sign up for both these programs. Fortunately they are already integrated into the system here at HubPages and at Blogger.com which makes life very simple.

So that's it. To make money on the side you need to choose a topic to write on; decide where to write; do your keyword reseearch; commit to writing every week; and sign up for Adsense and Amazon. Now get started!

Check Out My Earnings From HubPages

Amazon Affiliate Program